


Do You Believe In Magic?

by Telaryn



Category: Leverage
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Christmas Fluff, Domestic Fluff, Fluff, Gen, Holidays, Santa is Real
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-13
Updated: 2015-01-13
Packaged: 2018-03-07 08:16:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3167903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Telaryn/pseuds/Telaryn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Following the events of The Toy Job, Nate begins to rethink his position on the magic of Christmas.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Do You Believe In Magic?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ChouetteAnanas41](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChouetteAnanas41/gifts).



> What really caught me, to be honest, was your admission that you would be happy with the "corniest, cheesiest Christmas fluff". That's somebody I just have to satisfy. *g* So have a lot of fun, a dash of wistful angst, and a whole lot of belief in the impossible.

When you lose a child, all the magic is sucked out of the world. Even the color leaves for a time – the sparkling brightness children bring with them into this plane highlights everything with a glow that makes you understand that anything is possible. When you lose that, it’s hard to believe anything will ever matter anymore.

Christmas is often the first casualty of a loss this big. It’s a holiday designed for children of all ages, and from the moment parents know they will be parents they start thinking about what that first day of wonder and excitement will be? like. They can’t help it. The expectations are too high, the anticipation too great for even the hardest heart to ignore entirely.

Intellectually Nate understood he wasn’t alone in his feelings about Christmas; he wasn’t the only person who’d ever lost a child after all. By its very nature though, it was an isolating sort of loss – no matter how much support you got, you ended up believing that no one in the world would ever understand.

_”Shh! Nate and Sophie are probably still asleep!”_

The office area below had been strung with so many fairy lights that the space blazed nearly daylight bright. Hardison’s monitors had been set to show a Yule log blazing in a traditional looking fireplace, and stockings had been hung across the bottom – each one styled with its owner’s name in garish gold glitter and bulging with mysterious shaped packages.

_”I told you I heard Santa Claus! Look at everything he brought!”_

Stuffed toys and knick knacks littered nearly every horizontal surface. Ornaments had been added to the tree Parker had bought and decorated, and more treasure spilled out from underneath its branches. A crèche had been lovingly set to one side, each piece older than memory could stretch.

_”This is amazing – there is nothing on last night’s security feed. Parker…”_

_”It’s Santa! I told you! Last night was Christmas Eve – Hardison, we’ve got stockings too! There’s one for each of us!”_

Sometimes if you were very lucky, the universe sent you somebody whose need to believe in magic and wonder was so great that it could overwhelm the wreckage of your life and convince your heart that it might be worth the risk to try just one more time. Parker had never complained out loud, saying more often than not that you couldn’t miss what you never had.

She’d never been a great liar.

He pressed a button. Soft carols began playing from speakers positioned strategically around the office. Parker gasped, her expression rapturous as she slowly spun to drink in the sounds coming at her from every angle. _“I hope there was snow.”_

He felt Sophie come up behind him. “You didn’t manage that, did you?”

Sliding his finger across the touchpad, he clicked on a widget he’d left running in the top right corner of the screen. “Would you believe if the stocking keeps her distracted long enough I actually did?”

Laughing softly, she leaned down and kissed the side of his neck. Sighing with pleasure, he reached up and back to slide his finger into her hair. “You’re adorable,” she said. “Did you do all this yourself?”

“Eliot helped,” he admitted. “My idea though – I wanted it to be as over-the-top as we could without involving plastic flamingoes festooned in LEDs.”

 _”No,”_ Parker was saying. _”I’ve seen television shows. We can look in the stockings, but we can’t touch the stuff under the tree until everybody’s awake and we’ve had breakfast.”_ She paused, looking wistfully at the tree. _”Maybe Nate will bend on that rule.”_

 _”Mr. Bah Humbug?”_ Hardison laughed. _”He won’t care how we do things.”_

Nate felt Sophie’s concern like a warm wave of energy against his skin, but Hardison’s reaction was nothing more than he’d expected. “You need to set him straight!” she said, voice full of righteous indignation.

Turning he caught her wrist just as she was about to storm out of his reach. “Parker needs this,” he said gently.

She was still offended on his behalf, but the force of his desire was causing her resolve to weaken. “It’s not right, Nate, letting them think such horrible things about you.”

 _”I_ need Parker to have this,” he countered, letting her see some of what he was really feeling. “More than I need to be right or vindicated. Sophie, please.”

After a long moment, she finally conceded. “Only because it’s you asking,” she said. Satisfied she wouldn’t give him up, he relaxed back into his seat. “Are you coming downstairs? Even if you aren’t going to let me set the record straight, we probably should put the poor girl out of her misery.”

He smiled again. “You go. I’ll be down in a bit. Don’t tell her we can open presents before breakfast though – I want to handle that part.”

Sophie raised an eyebrow. “All right, but you know she’s going to be pestering Eliot the second she lays eyes on him to get him on her side.”

“You let me handle Eliot. He knows his part.”

When he was alone again, Nate opened up the file he’d left minimized on his desktop. When he’d first gotten the disk from Maggie it had sent him into a bit of a tailspin. He hadn’t wanted to have anything to do with the holiday, up to the point of trying to redirect everyone else’s attention by insisting that they limit their presents and a talk trying to get them to focus on the “true meaning of Christmas”.

Then he’d watched the final video file – Sam’s last Christmas. It had fallen squarely in the middle of what he’d come to think of as “the end times”; they were hemorrhaging money, bills were going unpaid, and Sam’s primary doctor was starting to spend more and more time at his side. His son had asked for the means to write his letter to Santa Claus as he’d done every year he’d been able to hold a writing implement.

This particular year he had asked for a toy Maggie had already cautioned him was more money than they could afford. With a child’s innocence and belief in magic, he’d taken his appeal to a higher authority, as it were.

Maggie had read the childish scrawl with tears in her eyes, then gone back to sit by their sleeping child’s bed. Nate had taken the letter up as a holy quest. He’d done the math, taken on the side jobs, sold everything he could get his hands on, and on Christmas morning he’d helped his son unwrap the present that should never have been.

 _“See Mommy?”_ the image of Sam said on Nate’s computer. _“See? I told you Santa would do it! Santa can do anything!”_

The argument Nate and Maggie had later that day about what he’d done had been one of the worst. Nate had taken her fear and frustration willingly though, because for one brief moment his son had believed in magic again.

And because Sam had believed, for one brief moment Nate had allowed himself to believe in the impossible too.


End file.
